In a world increasingly ruled by numbers and algorithms, award-winning journalist Chris Jones makes a compelling case for a more personal approach to analytical thinking​. THE EYE TEST is a necessary course correction, a call for a more balanced, personal approach to problem-solving. Award-winning journalist Chris Jones makes the case for the human element—for what smart, practiced, devoted people can bring to situations that have proved resistant to analytics. Jones shares what he’s learned from an army of extraordinary talents, including some of the best doctors, executives, athletes, meteorologists, magicians, designers, astrophysicists, and detectives in the world. There are lessons in their mastery. Of course, there is a place for numbers in decision-making. No baseball player should be judged by his jawline. But the analytics revolution sparked by Michael Lewis’s Moneyball now threatens to replace one kind of absurdity with another. We have developed a blind faith in the machine, the way a driver overly reliant on his GPS might be led off the edge of a cliff. Not all statistical analysis is sound. Algorithms aren’t infallible, and spreadsheets aren’t testaments. Trust in them too much, and they risk becoming instruments of destruction rather than understanding. Worse, data’s supremacy in our daily lives has led to a dangerous strain of anti-expertise: the belief that every problem is a math problem, and anyone given access to the right information will find the right answer. That taste doesn’t matter, experience doesn’t matter, creativity doesn’t matter. That we can’t believe our eyes, no matter how much they’ve seen. THE EYE TEST serves as a reminder that if beauty is less of a virtue in the age of analytics, a good eye still is. This book is a celebration of our greatest beholders—and an absorbing, inspiring guide for how you might become one, too.

Our eyes see flies. Our eyes see ants. Sometimes they see pink underpants. Oh, say can you see? Dr. Seuss’s hilarious ode to eyes gives little ones a whole new appreciation for all the wonderful things to be seen!

Bataille’s first novel, published under the pseudonym ‘Lord Auch’, is still his most notorious work. In this explicit pornographic fantasy, the young male narrator and his lovers Simone and Marcelle embark on a sexual quest involving sadism, torture, orgies, madness and defilement, culminating in a final act of transgression. Shocking and sacreligious, Story of the Eye is the fullest expression of Bataille’s obsession with the closeness of sex, violence and death. Yet it is also hallucinogenic in its power, and is one of the erotic classics of the twentieth century.

Simple rhymes describe the sights, sounds, and smells of Halloween.

They’re often behind the scenes, letting their work take center stage. But now Nathan Williams, founder and creative director of Kinfolk magazine and author of The Kinfolk Table, The Kinfolk Home, and The Kinfolk Entrepreneur—with over 250,000 copies in print combined—brings more than 90 of the most iconic and influential creative directors into the spotlight. In The Eye, we meet fashion designers like Claire Waight Keller and Thom Browne. Editorial directors like Fabien Baron and Marie-Amélie Sauvé. Tastemakers like Grace Coddington and Linda Rodin. We learn about the books they read, the mentors who guided them, their individual techniques for achieving success. We learn how they developed their eye—and how they’ve used it to communicate visual ideas that have captured generations and will shape the future. As an entrepreneur whose own work is defined by its specific and instantly recognizable aesthetic, Nathan Williams has a unique vision of contemporary culture that will make this an invaluable book for art directors, designers, photographers, stylists, and any creative professionals seeking inspiration and advice.