It scans the university press Of the books announced as coming in the new year, I’ve noted a few that are related in some way in terms of subject or theme. A student interested in one may have another. The next round of the season has been completed and planned with that possibility in mind.
The passages quoted are taken from material supplied by the publishers. One volume noted here was listed in the spring catalog but has now appeared. Otherwise, all books are scheduled to be published in 2025.
Wandering around continental United States to ask fellow citizens about their “significantly different social and political commitments,” Anand Pandian gathered the opinions of There’s Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life, and How to Take Them Down (Stanford University Press, May).
“We are trying to understand the forces that have reinforced our suspicions of others,” Pandian thinks of “strategies of mutual aid and social care” that may encourage “living in common with others.” But the Americans’ “connected walls” of “fortified homes and neighborhoods, piles of cars and trucks, views of the body as an armored fortress, and a media that shuts out dissenting views” seem designed to keep us strong against others. of the human condition.
However, the walls come down sometimes. Moments of compassion and generosity can bridge the gap between strangers, especially in times of crisis, which can be seen as prime moments for a very Hobbesian self-serving behavior. It draws on “leading research in the social sciences and psychology of altruism,” by Nicole Karlis. Your Mind on Altruism: The Power of Community Engagement in Disasters (University of California Press, March) considers kindness in difficult situations as a tool to reduce the “epidemic of loneliness and build[ing] a compassionate and strong community.”
Gert Tinggaard Svendsen pursues a similar social agenda Trust (Hopkins University Press, July). High levels of social trust promote “more cooperation and social responsibility, benefits to economic growth and social stability, and happier workplaces.” A population under constant surveillance may face a decrease in trust and the loss of associated social benefits. Society would do better, the author proposes, to focus on small and targeted resources instead of “enhancing competition, improving research, and promoting innovation.”
Steven Sloman considers the social impact of strong moral judgment on The Cost of Conviction: How Our Deepest Values Guide Us (MIT Press, May). Drawing on research in the psychology of decision-making (including studies of “judgment, conscious and unconscious decision-making processes, the roles of emotions, and … habit and addiction”), the author contrasts choices based on achieving good results, one-handed, and those guided by “deeper values about and what actions are appropriate,” on the other.
Sloman argues that this latter framework—when practiced too often or with intensity, at least—has cumulative effects: “We oversimplify things, we become disgusted and angry, and we act in ways that cause social divisions.” It happens a lot.
Three new books explore mysterious corners of natural history—and provides some relief from human disaster mode. Science fact can be stranger than science fiction.
I’m especially looking forward to Mindy Weisberger’s Rise of the Zombie Bugs: The Surprising Science of Parasitic Mind-Control (Hopkins University Press, April). Some fungi and bacteria infect invertebrates, enter their nervous system and use them to propagate—creating “armies of cicadas, spiders, and other dogs that helplessly follow the zombifier’s orders, living only to satisfy the needs of this animal until the pleasure of death is released (and often. ).”
The sound is subtle, perhaps, but still very impressive is that of Karen G. Lloyd Intraterrestrials: Discovering the Strangest Life on Earth (Princeton University Press, May). Life has evolved to live in some of the most anaerobic environments on Earth, “from methane seeps at the bottom of the oceans to the highest altitudes of Arctic permafrost,” and “the towering volcanoes of the Andes.” These “absolutely unknown” creatures “can live in boiling water, pure acid, and bleach … living in ways totally unknown to us outdoorsmen.”
Some of the same things may appear in Stacy Alaimo’s The Abyss Looks Back: Encountering Deep-Sea Life (University of Minnesota Press, May). Thanks to advanced technology that conducts research at the deepest levels of the ocean, researchers are discovering thousands of species of organisms that are “commonly referred to as ‘other nations,'” but are not particularly protected from human impact on the environment.
A few more to come the books sound like a reunion Carrots 2002 article: “Putting Mom on the Internet Is a Sisyphean Trial.” Eszter Hargittai and John Palfrey Wired Wisdom: How to Age Online (University of Chicago Press, July) identifies people age 60 and older as the “fastest growing demographic on the Internet”—”the most active on the Internet and the fastest to abandon social networks that don’t meet their needs.”
Based on “early interviews and survey results from thousands of people over sixty in North America and Europe,” the study suggests that “fake news actually deceives a minority of people over sixty, who are more experienced at checking sources and detecting propaganda.” (Not that the under-60s might find it too convincing, of course.)
Cristina Douglas and Andrew Whitehouse, editors Aging Beyond the Human: Animals, Robots, and Care in Late Life (Rutgers University Press, October 2024) finds adults associated with a network of friends, technical and organic. The participants provide “richly descriptive ethnographic accounts” of such relationships, “including moments of connection between the elderly and dogs in a long-term care facility, human care of aging laboratory animals, and robot-like companionship in later life.”
But we all have it to travel at a certain time. Robert Garland What to Expect When You Die: The Ancient Journey of Death and the Afterlife (Princeton University Press, April) is a travel guide to an undiscovered land. The author brings together advice and admonitions about the afterlife experience from several ancient cultures. Is there food in the afterlife? What about sex? And what will the neighbors be like? It’s good to be prepared, even though your afterlife may be different.
And finally, we deserve a special award for book titles, we have Edward Tenner’s Why the Hindenburg Had a Smoking Lounge: Essays on Unintended Consequences (American Philosophical Society Press/University of Pennsylvania Press, April)—the article nods to “the paradoxes that can result from the inherent conflict between consumer safety and product marketing.” Using “economics, engineering, psychology, science, and sociology perspectives,” the author explores “the negative and positive wonders of human ingenuity.”
The title image provides a perfect metaphor for something difficult to communicate. Finding yourself in a smoking room at The Hindenburgfear would be a perfectly reasonable response, but it is impossible to think about it for long, because it comes too late to make any difference. Some people find themselves in that lounge quite a bit, actually.
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