The first, Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing, was published by Penguin Random House (Crown) in 2015 and explores the psychology of uncertainty.
He is also the author of 12 Seconds of Silence: How a Team of Inventors, Tinkerers, and Spies Took Down a Nazi Superweapon, about the creation of the proximity fuse, which was published on August 4, 2020 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
After college he served in the Peace Corps in Iași, Romania, teaching English, and worked as a Research Coordinator at Harvard University, where he focused on behavioral economics.
Holmes received widespread attention[1][2][3][4][5] for his 2011 article in the New Republic, "Why Can't More Poor People Escape Poverty,"[6] as well as for his 2015 Op-Ed in the New York Times, "The Case for Teaching Ignorance.
Reviewing 12 Seconds of Silence in Air Mail, the renowned historian Andrew Roberts described the book as: “Meticulously researched and well-written…a prescient reminder of the role of science in both power and peace…an impressive and necessary monument to the spirit and sacrifice of the Americans whose innovation proved so imperative in winning the Second World War.” Roberts acknowledged that book corrects the "egregious error" of past histories which claim that the British invented the fuse and merely delivered it to the Americans to manufacture.