What nonfiction book will you want to see written ?

I have a list I keep on my phone of books I’d like to write or see written.

There’s a nonfiction book I’d love to see Carl Zimmer edit: Horrifying Nature: An Anthology of the Worst the World Has to Offer. I imagine it as a series of essays about the most awful, creepy, terrifying things the natural world serves up: anglerfish reproduction, llamas with their special castration teeth that evolved for the purpose of biting the testicles off competing males, bedbug traumatic insemination, parasitic wasps…

Think nature is kind and nurturing? HA! Here’s a paralyzed but otherwise completely healthy beetle being eaten alive from the inside by parasitic wasp larvae:

Show this to the next hippie who tells you something stupid like “I avoid chemicals and artificial things because nature knows best.”

Another nonfiction book I want to write is called A World of Sh*t: Normalizing Bad Design and Lazy Craftsmanship. It would be filled with examples of poor design—“psychic litter,” to borrow a term from David Joiner.

A third nonfiction book on my list of books that don’t exist but should is The Buglist: Cognitive errors (and how they trip you up). This would be a quick, humorous compendium of various errors of reasoning that are wired into our brains—things like confirmation bias, hasty generalization, pareidolia, promiscuous teleology, overfitting pattern recognition, and so on—along with why they exist, how to recognize them, and how they bring you to wrong conclusions.

And finally, I just started a nonfiction book on DIY sex toy design. How to design sex toys in a 3D program, how to make molds, how to mix and pour silicone. I plan to self-publish this rather than looking for a publisher, and I will include a bunch of downloadable 3D models with the book.