Enlarge / A good amethyst may make a good metaphor for geology as a whole. (credit: Getty Images ) To outsiders, geology can seem as dull as a rock, with a lexicon just as opaque, but to insiders, it is a limitless source of wonder. Various authors have used different tools to crack open geology’s […]
Enlarge (credit: Adam Gault ) Neil Bradbury is a physiology professor whose first book, A Taste for Poison , uses tales of poisons and poisoners as a means to explain physiological processes by describing how each poison disrupts them. The grisly episodes are like the particular proverbial spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go […]
Enlarge (credit: TEK IMAGE/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY ) Laurence King Publishing , based in London, is “one of the world’s leading publishers of books and gifts on the creative arts. ” They have a series called “The Short Story of X”; so far it includes the Short Story of Art , of Modern Art , associated […]
Enlarge If ever there was a moment to brush up on your knowledge of the immune system, this is that moment. (Okay, March-April 2020 may have been preferable, but you can still catch up. ) And Immune is the perfect vehicle in order to help you do that. This book is phenomenal. It is engaging, […]
Enlarge (credit: Makiko Tanigawa / Getty Images ) Island Press is “the nation’s leading publisher on environmental issues. ” In its latest release, Thicker than Water , Erica Cirino, a photojournalist and licensed wildlife rehabilitator, explores what becomes of plastic—all 8 billion or so tons of it that humans have manufactured in the last seventy-ish […]
Enlarge Walter Freeman was ambidextrous, so he could do two lobotomies at the same time. These involved jabbing two icepicks from the junk drawer in his kitchen into the eye sockets of two different patients until he felt the thin orbital bones behind their eyes crack. Swishing the picks back and forth was then all […]
Enlarge (credit: Little, Brown and Company) Everyone has biases. And everyone knows that everyone has biases, and that these biases affect our judgements. Bias is explainable, and our brains like things they can explain. One of the leading explainers of our biases is economist Daniel Kahneman, famed for a Nobel win and his book Thinking, […]
Enlarge / Artist’s impression of either understanding being achieved or intergalactic war being incited, I’m not sure which. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images) Andy Weir’s latest, Project Hail Mary, is a good book that you’ll almost certainly enjoy if you enjoyed Weir’s freshman novel The Martian. It’s another tale of solving problems with science, […]
Enlarge / Jason Schreier’s latest deep dive on the game industry is out on May 11 at all major booksellers. (credit: Grand Central Publishing) Games industry journalist Jason Schreier has left his mark over the years by digging up behind-the-scenes dirt at sites like Kotaku and Bloomberg, but he may be best known for Blood, […]
Enlarge / Cover art from Project Hail Mary. (credit: Ballantine Books) Project Hail Mary, the latest from science fiction author Andy Weir, is a lot like Weir’s first novel, The Martian. It’s a rapid-fire romp through insurmountable problem after insurmountable problem, focusing on a protagonist who quips his way through each issue with snappy first-person narration […]