In no particular order, here are some books, websites, articles (and even video series) that I enjoy and learned alot from!

Books

This is the story of the Greenland ice sheet, which stores the history of Earth's recent climate.  Amazing respect for the scientists who were able to tease feeble signals about the past out of things like the relative weight of oxygen molecules in water, and the composition of ancient sea shells.  Its scary how fast the climate has changed in the recent past.

A very readable account of the evolution of whales (which occurred approximately 50 million years ago in modern-day Pakistan).  Told by the discoverer of many of the transitional forms, an entertaining way to learn both some biology and geology!

Here is the story of the Devonian extinctions (350ish million years ago) which almost wiped out the fish which had begun to conquer the land.  Quite biology - heavy (too many big words for my taste) but does a great job of describing life way back then; from insects to vegetation to (of course) fish with legs.

For someone who doesn't know that much chemistry - this was a very interesting read.  A history oxygen and it's ties to life - from the great oxygen death around the time of first photosynthesis to the highly - oxygenated atmosphere of the Carboniferous to now.

My first undergrad exposure to linear algebra was highly focused towards techniques for solving ODE's, and somewhere in that process the "feel" of the subject was lost on me.  This book helped me a lot; its focus on the geometry and postponement of formulas involving determinants made this one of my favorite early undergrad books.

The Dakota people have lived in Minnesota for thousands of years, and this book draws on oral histories and early accounts to paint a picture of the culture in the upper midwest prior to invasion.  I wish this book was taught in school, as many in Minnesota like me grew up without knowing anything about the rightful owners of our homeland.

Trilobites look like little horseshoe-crab like bugs, but these little unassuming creatures dominated earth's seas for hundreds of millions of years.  A very readable account of this crazy time in history when earth looked almost nothing like it does now.  

Almost stranger than the weird entanglement properties of quantum systems is the fact that these are often destroyed when the system interacts with the larger world.  While fairly mathematical, this is a well written introduction to this phenomenon, known as decoherence.

I've always been interested in the philosophy of the mind, and first picked up this book to try and understand the argument for consciousness being non-reductive.   Do you think that its possible to imagine a zombie who acts identically to you but has no inner experiences?  Check this book out to see how far this thought experiment can take you.

One of the most amazing things we have learned about our solar system in my life time is that it is full of water!  Dealing with both the past oceans of Mars / Venus and the current oceans of the Jovian moons & Enceladus Alien Seas is a cool introduction to hydrology on other worlds.

For a billion or two years after formation, Earth was quite a different place.  This book tells the story of early life: from the very beginning until the Cambrian Explosion, when more familiar creatures hit the scene.  

When we think about our impact on the earth, we usually think short term: what effect will humans have on the world a hundred, a thousand, or 10 thousand years from now?  This book looks long term, and asks what evidence of humanity could survive 100 million years into the future.  A humbling read, and a fun introduction to geology!

A planet's atmosphere controls its weather, erosion and many surface properties, so its interesting to wonder what the world would be like if our atmosphere was radically different.  Luckily for us, our own solar system provides many examples of radically distinct atmospheres - and this book provides a readable summary of their behavior!

When we usually think about DNA we think about the genes it encodes - but these take up a surprisingly small volume - around 2% in humans - of all the base pairs.  This book gives an account for non-biologists about what we know about the other 98%.

In the 1700s Euler discovered that if you take the number of faces minus edges plus vertices for a spherical polyhedron, you always get two.  This book tells the story of this realization in the historical context of the slow invention of the field of topology - a great read for people interested in math history!

Humans have been living together in complex societies for tens of thousands of years - each of which had its own ways of dealing with the social problems of human life.  This book is a survey of some aspects of traditional societies, from child rearing to warfare to language - makes you think about what life was like for most humans who have ever lived

The story of evolution is still clearly written in our genes.  This book gives a highly - readable account of the origin of many parts of us - from our bilateral symmetry to hiccups, to the spinning feeling when you get too drunk.  

While in calculus courses we often discuss minimizing functions, we stop short of discussing the more complex calculus of variations - minimizing functions of functions.  This book gives a popular account of the history: from hanging cables to refraction to the principle of least action, it puts this mathematical story into a very human and historical context.

Definitely my favorite textbook for an introduction to modern algebra (groups, rings, modules, fields, and categories).  It introduces categorical concepts right along side everything else, which really made me feel like I had my foot in the door when trying to read other category-theory heavy mathematics.

One of the first popular physics books I read as a kid, this was my first introduction to the idea of higher dimensional spaces and curvature.  These concepts are introduced through talking about 'cool' physics ideas like small curled up dimensions, parallel universes and other things that excited young Steve's inner nerdiness.

We share 98% of our DNA with chimpanzees, but our species have taken radically different paths.  This book begins discussing the parts of culture common to us both, and then goes on to give an account of our quick rise to dominate the world over the past 50,000 years.

The basic laws of mechanics are symmetric with respect to time; so why does it appear to "flow" in one direction only?  This book covers different irreversible phenomena in thermodynamics and quantum mechanics, and some philosophical views on the directionality of time.

The space of ways to tile the plane with rectangles is a three manifold - and a Euclidean one at that!  This book provides an introduction to the unit tangent bundles over orbifolds corresponding to symmetry groups of the plane, sphere, and hyperbolic space.

I got myself a copy of this book after taking multivariable calculus, and while I wasn't quite ready for it at the time, it gave me a first introduction to why one would want "coordinate-invariant" things in mathematics.  After coming back to it later, I found it a great help in understanding differential forms intuitively as preparation for de Rham theory.

A fun, well-written account of the many examples we have of evolution by natural selection.  In a world where scientific topics like this often become politicized its useful to sometimes just sit down and read through the detailed science and careful research that helps us understand the world around us.

This book presents a theory of the mind (specifically, about language and cognition) which really resonates with me.  Through detailed analysis of the metaphors which underly our language (like, in English, the idea that time is a line with future in front of us and the past behind) we can see how we have bootstrapped ourselves from the physical world to the complex conversations language allows.

Huge fan of this book for learning about differential topology and the smooth - manifold machinery needed to begin studying Riemannian geometry.  Also a fan of John Lee's other books, on Topological manifolds and Riemannian geometry.

This book is an expansion of the material covered in the first few chapters of Thurston's lecture notes on 3 dimensional topology.  Great book with lots of insightful drawings, and exercises to help check your understanding along the way.

For me, a very visual learner, this book was a great introduction to some of the concepts of complex analysis.  Should probably be read alongside another book; but the phase portraits showing power series convergence, conformal maps, and the behavior of rational functions are very enlightening!

The Pirahã people of Amazonia speak a language with many interesting features - this book is the personal account of a missionary who went to live with them, learned their language to the best of his ability, and ended up staying.  A fun personal story and interesting insights into a little - contacted culture.

"We are made of stardust" is a cute phrase thrown around sometimes, but it's actually true.  This book traces the elements in our bodies and our world back to their violent creation far away in the cores of long dead stars.

Articles