Amanda Montell joins the Mill Valley Library to discuss her new book The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality. From the bestselling author of Cultish and host of the podcast Sounds Like a Cult, The Age of Magical Overthinking offers a delicious blend of cultural criticism and personal narrative that explores our cognitive biases and the power, disadvantages, and highlights of magical thinking.

Following her insightful books Wordslut and Cultish, Amanda Montell now turns her erudite eye to the inner workings of the human mind and its biases in her most personal and electrifying work yet. “Magical thinking” can be broadly defined as the belief that one's internal thoughts can affect unrelated events in the external world. In all its forms, magical thinking works in service of restoring agency amid chaos, but in The Age of Magical Overthinking, Montell argues that in the modern information age, our brains' coping mechanisms have been overloaded, and our irrationality turned up to an eleven.

Amanda Montell is a writer and linguist from Baltimore. Along with hosting the podcast Sounds Like a Cult, her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, and more. She holds a degree in linguistics from NYU and lives in Los Angeles with her partner, plants, and pets.

Kristin Keane is the author of An Encyclopedia of Bending Time and Luminaries. She is a researcher at Stanford University where she also earned a PhD.

Our bookseller for this program is Sausalito Books by the Bay.