Summary: Anil Seth’s Being You is a new and groundbreaking examination of the nature, science, and ethics of consciousness. Seth presents three theories to contextualize current research and guide future efforts to explain what consciousness is and how it arises. The first theory is the “Real Problem of Consciousness,” an alternative to the traditional “Hard Problem” and […]
Summary: Lisa Feldman Barrett’s Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain is an exceptionally lucid and commendable contribution to popular neuroscience. In this series of concise, highly-accessible essays, Barrett synthesizes a huge field of academic knowledge in a fashion that any literate person can enjoy and benefit from. Her central thesis is that the brain is […]
Summary: Richard Powers’s Bewilderment is a novel narrated by single father, Theo, who is trying to care for his young son, Robin. Theo is an academic astrobiologist who constructs computer models of how life could evolve on distant exoplanets; he is also a widower whose wife died in a tragic accident. Robin is a troubled child with […]
Summary: Katherine D. Kinzler’s How You Say It is a book about how our ways of speaking influence our internal, social, and political experiences. Kinzler argues that all people have “language identities” that typically go unacknowledged, and seeks to highlight the importance of such identities in determining various life outcomes. Some sections of the book focus on […]
Summary: Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi is a fantasy book in which the titular character attempts to understand the fundamental nature of the “House” he inhabits. The House is a seemingly-endless chain of statue-filled Halls rising out of an ocean. As Piranesi learns more about the House and encounters other characters within its labyrinthine structure, he becomes increasingly skeptical […]
Summary: Hanya Yanagihara’s To Paradise is an exquisitely-crafted and emotionally-gripping novel that covers a huge swath of thematic, historical, and futuristic ground. The story is told in three Books, each of which is loosely connected through the recurrence of certain character names and relationship dynamics that inhabit a single home in Washington Square, New York City. Book […]
Summary: Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch is a work of magical realism about a woman who develops the bizarre habit of transforming into a dog and leaving her house to hunt small animals at night. Frustrated with the challenges of mothering her young son and the lack of support from her amiable but largely-absent husband, the “mother” (or MM––we […]
Summary: Gernot Wagner’s Geoengineering: The Gamble is a primer on the history of solar geoengineering, the state of current research, and possibilities for future experimentation and deployment. In a succinct and balanced fashion, Wagner discusses the various technical ways solar geoengineering might be implemented, as well as the morass of ethical and geopolitical problems that deployment may […]
Note: In July 2022, I published an extended review of this book. You can check that out here. Summary: Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock is a work of “cli-fi” (climate fiction) set in the near future, probably sometime in the 2040s. The book invites readers to imagine what might happen if someone unilaterally decided to initiate a solar geoengineering […]
Summary: Elizabeth Kolbert’s Under A White Sky is about the history and possible futures of geoengineering. Specifically, Kolbert examines how various geoengineering technologies are being used or may soon be used to combat the worst effects of climate change. Part One, “Down the River,” describes efforts to keep invasive Asian carp out of the Great Lakes, and […]