A quarter-century ago two widely read books by computer scientist Ray Kurzweil helped ignite a debate about humanity’s future. The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999) and The Singularity Is Near (2005) envisioned a world then a half-century in the future in which homo sapiens would merge with...
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A review of A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson. @@@@ (4 out of 5). It’s easy to get the impression that science has answered all the big questions and is spending more and more time and money focusing on the little ones. Read Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, and you will quickly be disabused of that illusion. Truth to tell, the human race is still abysmally ignorant of some of the most fundamental matters that determine how, why, and where we live.
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You probably don’t need another terrifying book about the climate crisis to convince you that global “warming” is real. Chances are, you’ve known that for years. Or, at the very least, it became clear to you from the recurring floods, killer storms, and deadly heat waves...
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A little more than three decades ago, a British-American historian named David Christian introduced a fresh new approach to history. He was teaching then at Macquarie University in Sydney. There, he introduced the concept of Big History. Merging historical study with insights from physics,...
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Why was Ivan the Terrible so terrible? Why did Napoleon lose the Battle of Waterloo? What did Queen Victoria have to do with the fall of Russia’s last tsar? These are among the intriguing questions Frederick Cartwright and Michael Biddiss answer in Disease and History. The book, first...
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A review of The Emperor of All Maladies: A History of Cancer, by Siddhartha Mukherjee. @@@@@ (5 out of 5). Dr. Mukherjee, a cancer researcher with clinical experience, surveys the history of cancer from Imhotep to the present day. He combines moving personal experiences, historical vignettes, biographical sketches of some of the fascinating individuals who have advanced our understanding of cancer, and wonderfully articulate explanations of complex scientific matters. The Emperor of All Maladies is this year’s winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction, and it deserves every bit of recognition it’s gotten.
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Estimated reading time: 7 minutes Mozart. Joan of Arc. Einstein. Marie Curie. Steve Jobs. In The Hidden Habits of Genius, Craig Wright plumbs the depths of human capacity in nearly 100 extraordinarily successful individuals through the ages. In them, he finds the characteristics of genius that...
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We can’t look back at our time from the perspective of the 22nd century. But if we were able to do so, it seems likely that one of the dominant phenomena we would observe in our era is the emergence of artificial intelligence. Few developments in science and technology have caused both more...
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Estimated reading time: 9 minutes As the son and brother of doctors, I’ve long had an intense interest in medical history. And I’ve been more aware than most Americans what the threat of epidemic disease represents to our future. That awareness came to the surface in 2017, when I published Hell on...
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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes Ask just about anyone why we live so much longer these days, and the answer will come quickly. It’s the doctors, right? Continuing advances in medical science surely account for those centenarians who keep cropping up on obituary pages. After all, human life...
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Henrietta Lacks was thirty-one years old when she entered Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore early in 1951. She was Catholic, the mother of five children, and African-American. Hopkins was one of the nation’s most prestigious medical schools—and the only hospital in the area that admitted...
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In a full-page ad for Michael Lewis’ new book inside the front cover of the New York Times Magazine (May 9, 2021), the publisher asks, “Where did we go wrong? And how can we get it right?” After all, as the ad states, “In 2019, a panel of public health experts judged the...
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If you’re considering this book in hopes of finding some magical supplement or salve to add ten years to your life, forget it. The author is a PhD physicist turned computational biologist—a serious scientist. In Ageless, he relates the latest findings about the emergence of a new field...
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A closely-linked network of several score brilliant men and a few women are pushing the boundaries of artificial intelligence research. You’ll meet many of these high-achieving and sometimes eccentric individuals in the pages of Genius Makers. You’ll get a glimpse inside Google,...
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For at least 200,000 years, homo sapiens enjoyed the bounty of the Earth, rendering only minimal damage to the planet. That began to change with the advent of the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century. Achim Steiner, Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme,...
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UC Berkeley biochemist won the Nobel Prize for the revolutionary CRISPR technology that is leading to breakthroughs in medicine.
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On October 10, 2024, a NASA spacecraft dubbed the Europa Clipper is scheduled to launch toward the large Jovian moon of Europa. It’s expected to arrive in April 2030. The Europa Clipper is just the final expression of a long procession of planned missions to Europa and the other Galilean...
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Some call it a hoax. For most of the rest of us, myself assuredly included, it’s the climate emergency or the climate crisis. And no matter what you “believe,” climate change is underway. It’s warming the planet. It’s accelerating. It holds the potential to end the long march of the human race...
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My mother went ballistic when Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language appeared in 1961. She’d taught English for a time during the Depression. Then, there was a right way and a wrong way to express yourself. Rules were rules—and English teachers knew...
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Most of the books about artificial intelligence highlight such things as self-driving cars and facial recognition—the brilliant innovations in hardware and software by the engineers and coders who build the stuff and make it work. They dwell variously on the field’s potential and its impact...
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Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review, with links to other nonfiction content.
Science Fiction Monday includes my latest SF book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Mysteries & Thrillers Tuesday includes my latest mystery and thriller book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review, with links to other nonfiction content.
The Weekly includes summaries and links to all the previous week’s three to five book reviews, including some that don’t appear in any of the other newsletters.
Science Fiction Monday includes my latest SF book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Mysteries & Thrillers Tuesday includes my latest mystery and thriller book review, with links to other science fiction content.
Nonfiction Wednesday includes my latest nonfiction book review, with links to other nonfiction content.
The Weekly includes summaries and links to all the previous week’s three to five book reviews, including some that don’t appear in any of the other newsletters.