The author
Neil P. Bostick
Neil P. Bostick is a writer and entrepreneur. He started his first company while still at university and has since built and run a small group of internet businesses, including a digital mergers and acquisitions firm. He wrote this book in New York, where he has spent most of the past decade, and where the research in it steadily made his own apartment harder to defend.
He runs most mornings on the Hudson, ferments most of what is on his shelves, has paddled the same lakes in northern Ontario for fifteen summers, and has walked long routes in Spain, Italy and Japan. He is leaving the city to look for the kind of community this book keeps describing: smaller, more self-sufficient, dark enough at night to see the stars.
Readers can find him at NPB.com.
A writer, not a clinician
The author is a writer, not a clinician, and nothing on this site is medical advice. The evidence grades are not his opinion of a treatment: they follow the book's stated method, which grades each claim by the kind of study behind it, and the method and its definitions are published. Read the book's medical disclaimer before acting on any of it.
Report an error or a newer study through the contact form. Corrections are published in the corrections register.
Where the author appears in the book
The book is not a memoir, and its case never rests on the author's own numbers. Where his measurements do appear, they are labelled as one person's readings and treated as illustration rather than evidence: a single body is a sample of one, and the chapters say so where it matters.
Why the corrections are public
The second edition corrects the first in 71 places, several of them reversals of claims the first edition made with confidence. They are published rather than quietly dropped, because a book that never visibly corrects itself gives a reader no way to tell a careful claim from a careless one. The full register is here.
Spiral Staircase
How Your Ancient Body Navigates the Modern World. Revised Second Edition, 2026. 16 chapters in 6 parts, 343 pages, every recommendation graded.