Caffeine: How Caffeine Created the Modern World

An Audible original in which Pollan investigates the world's most widely used psychoactive drug by, among other things, giving it up for three months and reporting on the wreckage. He traces coffee and tea from their origins through the coffeehouse as an engine of the Enlightenment — a place where people met sober and argued — and into the industrial factory shift, which caffeine made possible. The scientific material is the sharpest part: caffeine works by blocking adenosine rather than adding energy, meaning the debt is deferred rather than cancelled, and it measurably degrades the deep sleep that would have removed the need for it. Short, personal, and unusually good on the drug most of us never think of as one.