Penguin Random House: Tom Vanderbilt to Share the Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning via Zoom

BEGINNERS is a playful journey into the transformative joys that come with starting something new, no matter your age. Inspired by his young daughter’s insatiable need to know how to do almost everything, and stymied by his own rut of mid-career competence, Vanderbilt began a year of learning purely for the sake of learning. Along the way, he interviewed dozens of experts to explore the fascinating psychology and science behind the benefits of becoming an adult beginner. Weaving comprehensive research and surprising insight gained from his year of learning dangerously, Vanderbilt shows how anyone can get better at beginning again—and, more important, why they should take those first awkward steps. BEGINNERS is about how small acts of reinvention, at any age, can make life seem magical.

Tom Vanderbilt has written for many publications, including The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal Magazine, Popular Science, Financial Times, Smithsonian, and London Review of Books, among many others. He is a contributing editor of Wired UK, Outside, and Artforum. He is author of You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), and Survival City: Adventures Among the Ruins of Atomic America. He has appeared on a wide range of television and radio programs, from the Today show to the BBC’s World Service to NPR’s “Fresh Air.” He has been a visiting scholar at NYU’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management, a research fellow at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, a fellow at the Design Trust for Public Space, and a winner of the Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, among other honors. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.