This course reads down selectively The New York Times hard- and paperback nonfiction bestseller list, searching for books which would make for lively Harkness conversations about meaning, purpose and value in one's life. The primary focus of the class is on these discussions, specifically, gathering a group of energized and like-minded students who are interested in reading and talking about books and the issues contained therein. Drawing together the knowledge gleaned from their time at Exeter, and the various courses an Academy student might take, the students in this class will try to draw connections and synthesize the materials they have covered in other classes in their Exeter career as such information pertains to the various books this course might read. Although the reading list will change from year to year, depending upon the bestsellers of the day, in the recent past this course has and may read such books as Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers; Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In; Jon Krakauer's Missoula; Trevor Noah's Born a Crime;J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy; Roxane Gay's Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body; Ellen Pao's Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change; Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy; Sherry Turkle's Reclaiming Conversation; Levitt and Dubner's Freakonomics; Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me or We Were Eight Years in Power; Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom; Marina Keegan's The Opposite of Loneliness; Michael Lewis's The Undoing Project, plus many others in whole or in part. Most written work will focus on self-reflections on the students' time at the Academy and beyond.