INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER From the bestselling author of Cultish and host of the
podcast Sounds Like a Cult a delicious blend of cultural criticism and personal narrative that
explores our cognitive biases and the power disadvantages and highlights of magical thinking.
Utilizing the linguistic insights of her witty and brilliant (Blyth Roberson author of America
the Beautiful?) first book Wordslut and the sociological explorations of her breakout hit
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: think of the conviction that one can manifest their way out of poverty stave off cancer
with positive vibes thwart the apocalypse by learning to can their own peaches or transform
an unhealthy relationship to a glorious one with loyalty alone. 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 brain's coping mechanisms
have been overloaded and our irrationality turned up to an eleven. In a series of razor sharp
deeply funny chapters Montell delves into a cornucopia of the cognitive biases that run
rampant in our brains from how the halo effect cultivates worship (and hatred) of
larger-than-life celebrities to how the sunk cost fallacy can keep us in detrimental
relationships long after we've realized they're not serving us. As she illuminates these
concepts with her signature brilliance and wit Montell's prevailing message is one of hope
empathy and ultimately forgiveness for our anxiety-addled human selves. If you have all but
lost faith in our ability to reason Montell aims to make some sense of the senseless. To crack
open a window in our minds and let a warm breeze in. To help quiet the cacophony for a while
or even hear a melody in it.
