Jamil Zaki

We’re pleased to share videos from the 2026 First-Year Experience® Conference. Whether you weren’t able to join us at the conference or would simply like to hear the talks again, please take a moment to view the clips below.   Penguin Random House Author Breakfast Monday, February 17th, 7:15 – 8:45 am PST   This

With the fall semester in full swing, colleges and universities around the country have announced their Common Reading books for the upcoming 2025-26 academic year. We’ve compiled a list of over 291 programs and their title selections from publicly available sources, which you can download here: First-Year Reading 2025-26. We will continue to update this

We are delighted to present our new First-Year & Common Reading Catalog for 2026! From award-winning fiction, poetry, memoir, and biography to new books about the environment, current events, history, public health, science, social justice, student success, and technology, the titles presented in our common reading catalog will have students not only eagerly flipping through

Jamil Zaki, Professor of Psychology at Stanford University and author of The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World, joined Penguin Random House Education and the National Orientation Directors Association (NODA) at their annual conference, held virtually this October, to speak about the psychology behind empathy. Based on 15 years of research, he