Yuval Noah Harari

Harari's day job is much narrower than his reputation. He is a professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, trained as a medievalist and military historian, and his academic books are about special operations in the age of chivalry and about how Renaissance soldiers wrote their own memoirs. Sapiens, published in 2011, grew out of the lectures for an undergraduate world history survey, which explains both its virtues and its faults: the compression, the confident throughline, the willingness to state plainly what a monograph would hedge for a chapter.

That confidence is the product. He argues at the level of the species, and the moves are consistent. Storytelling is the technology that lets very large numbers of strangers cooperate. The arrangements we treat as permanent are recent and contingent. The interesting question about any human institution is what problem it once solved. Historians object, often reasonably, that the examples are selected to fit the thesis and that the certainty outruns the evidence. Readers do not mind, because the alternative is a shelf of books that never commit to anything.

His later work has moved from past to future to present and back: consciousness and free will, artificial intelligence, the flow of information through societies. He is now a public intellectual more than a working historian, and the books have become a genre other writers are trying to reproduce.